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From: Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech•com>
To: Mark Smith <lk-netdev@lk-netdev•nosense.org>
Cc: netdev@vger•kernel.org
Subject: Re: Ethernet low-level frame debugging support
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 13:19:44 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4DFE59E0.9070503@candelatech.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20110619104431.23a22fe9@opy.nosense.org>

On 06/18/2011 06:14 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Firstly, I think this is a potentially quite useful feature for
> networking people and that I hope it makes it into the kernel proper.
>
> One thing I've thought is that perhaps it might be made and named a bit
> more generally, as NICs will also drop frames for other reasons other
> than FCs failures e.g. runt frames. So perhaps something like "true
> promiscuous" or "full promiscuous" might be a more general name, and if
> it is enabled, then all NIC error checking that can be switched off is
> switched off. Looking at the chipset data sheets for a few NICs that I
> have / have had (netgear FA312 (natsemi ns83815), smc epic100, ne2000),
> they all seem to have registers which allow switching off many if not
> all of the NIC error checking settings.

I called it 'save-rxerr' in ethtool...I think that is general enough?

The early patch that saves the FCS just passes the 4-byte FCS up the stack.
It doesn't change the ability to receive bad frames or not..that is in the
later patches.

>
> The other thing I've thought could be useful would be to be able to
> send runts by not padding the frames when they're less then 64 bytes.
> I've been able to test if this is possible with the netgear FA312, as
> the chipset does the padding. I connected it back to back with an
> e1000e I have, switched off the chipset automatic padding on the FA312,
> sent small traffic, and then saw that the e1000e's internal
> rx_short_length_errors counter correspondingly increased. Of course I
> can't see them with tcpdump on the e1000e because it is dropping them.

Maybe the SO_NOFCS option could change to SO_DRVOPTS and take a bit-field
instead of just be on/off.  NOFCS could be one flag, NOPAD another, etc.
That would give ability to send non-padded frames if the driver has
support.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech•com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com

  reply	other threads:[~2011-06-19 20:19 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2011-06-19  1:14 Ethernet low-level frame debugging support Mark Smith
2011-06-19 20:19 ` Ben Greear [this message]
2011-06-19 23:27   ` Mark Smith

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